Twombly

Cy Twombly (Edwin Parker Twombly Jr.; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter and sculptor whose work fused drawing and painting with writing, making him a leading figure in postwar art. Born in Lexington, Virginia, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Students League of New York before moving to Rome in 1957, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

Twombly’s canvases and drawings are characterized by large fields of color overlaid with gestural, scribbled lines, calligraphic marks, and phrases or fragments of text. He employed a variety of media—including oil paint, chalk, graphite, and wax crayon—and often created works on multiple panels or on a monumental scale. His imagery tends to draw on myths, literature, and history, rendered in a spare, graffiti-like language that blurs the line between painting and writing.

Early works such as the Lepanto cycle and his later “blackboard” paintings helped redefine abstraction by emphasizing mark-making and inscription over figurative content. Twombly’s influence extends across painting, sculpture, and installation, and his works are held by major museums worldwide. He received several honors and had major retrospective exhibitions at institutions such as Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou. Twombly died in Rome in 2011; his work is celebrated for its lyrical gesture, textual resonance, and synthesis of memory, myth, and inquiry.